A Digital Matchmaker for the City and Its Public

NEW ROLE Rachel Sterne, New York City's chief digital officer, testified at a City Council hearing in June. Ms. Sterne's task is to reinvent how the city engages with its residents, primarily through social media like Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter.Credit
Michael Appleton for The New York Times

ONE of the most popular online inventions of New York City’s government is The Daily Pothole, a blog that tracks, in gravelly detail, the milling and paving of street cavities from Midwood to Midtown. It is eye candy for the asphalt-obsessed: panoramic photos accompanied by comic captions (“Bump!” “Sneak Attack!”) and a goggle-eyed mascot named Warmy, an asphalt plug, to boot.

More than six months into her job, Ms. Sterne, a former digital consultant who started an international news site at 22, has found that many people inside and outside city government are still puzzled by her position.

“This role is not just about a Twitter account,” she said in a recent interview, though she does have one, @rachelsterne, with roughly 21,000 followers. “It’s about evolving government. It’s about doing a better and better job of serving New Yorkers.”

As one of only a few governmental officials in the country focused on the digital arena, Ms. Sterne is still working to define her mission. She has embarked on a detailed study of how New Yorkers connect with government online, aggressively courted private-sector entrepreneurs to help with public projects and sung the praises of digital interaction in the halls of government.

But the rapidly shifting dynamics of the digital sector make it hard to predict what Ms. Sterne will be able to accomplish. Not to mention that she has virtually no experience in government, and that she is among the youngest faces in the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. “There are a lot of moving pieces,” she said.

Her appointment to a job that pays $115,000 a year created something of a stir on the Internet. Some bloggers praised the city for recognizing the importance of the digital frontier, while others questioned Ms. Sterne’s qualifications.

Ms. Sterne, who grew up in Brooklyn and Westchester County and studied history at New York University, gained prominence as an evangelist for citizen journalism. Her Web site, Ground Report, compiles firsthand news reports from around the world, enabling 10,000 contributors to report instantly on breaking news like the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, and the Beijing Olympics. (Ms. Sterne’s father now oversees the site.)

Ms. Sterne worked briefly at LimeWire, a music file-sharing company that came under fire for piracy and was shut down after several music companies sued. Before joining the city, she ran her own digital consulting firm for two years.

Her close bonds with executives at companies like Foursquare, Facebook and Tumblr have been a boon in her new job, Ms. Sterne said, helping her build bridges to the technology community. “A lot of people have said to me, ‘We felt like one of us was in that role,’ ” she said.

But her connections have also created awkward moments, as in May when the city promoted the technology of Livestream during her first news conference with Mr. Bloomberg. The company, which broadcasts events on the Web, is run by her fiancé, Max Haot.

Ms. Sterne spends much of her time talking to technology companies about ways to use their platforms to showcase the work of city agencies. The other day, she was on the phone with Sleepover, an online design studio, discussing the design of a centralized Tumblr page for the city.

“We want to represent the city in a professional light, but we also want to use a tone that is appropriate for the platform,” she said during the call.

Ms. Sterne’s aim is to persuade colleagues in government to embrace, not fear, digital outlets, a task that can be delicate in an age of Twitter scandals. When she proposed hosting a “hackathon,” a meeting of programmers, to solicit ideas for redesigning the city’s Web site, she recalled, she had to explain to colleagues that it would not pose a security threat.

It helps that the city government is led by a technophile who reads speeches on an iPad, regularly uses Google Maps and has developed an affinity for trying to stump the song-identifying mobile application Shazam.

For all his technological prowess, however, the mayor has largely avoided social media. While he has more than 123,000 followers on Twitter, his aides manage the account.

Ms. Sterne said she was unsure whether she could persuade Mr. Bloomberg to start personally posting to Twitter, though she will host a social media training day for other city officials in September. “You only use it if you’re using it in an authentic way,” she said. “You don’t want to force this stuff.”

Her central achievement since January is a 62-page report, Road Map for the Digital City, in which she outlined an ambitious plan to open up vast reserves of data, improve wireless Internet accessibility and expand the city’s mobile-application offerings.

The response was largely positive, but some questioned the city’s strategy.

Steven Romalewski, a specialist in data visualization and mapping at the Center for Urban Research at the City University of New York, said the city was too focused on cultivating private-sector relationships rather than working to build its own technology and ensuring full access to data.

“Why hitch your wagon to these flash-in-the-pan companies?” Mr. Romalewski said. “Should the city in effect be outsourcing or should the city be doing a better job of developing in-house capacity?”

Ms. Sterne, however, said the city was diversifying its platforms, for instance, by providing access to the 311 help line through phone, text, Twitter and, soon, online chat. “We need to be logical in leveraging tools that the audience that we’re trying to reach is using,” she said.

Ms. Sterne seems comfortable in her new role, if occasionally taken aback by the realities of working in the public sphere. She said she had found only one other chief digital officer, in São Paulo, Brazil.

When she solicited questions on Twitter recently, she received an unexpected missive in response: “How do you justify paying a chief digital officer six figures for this stunt when an average high-schooler could do it for free?”

Ms. Sterne, in her guarded way, laughed off the inquiry. “It sort of comes with the territory,” she said.

At some level, she seems proud to be seen as the whiz kid who somehow infiltrated city government.

When John Gambling interviewed her on his radio show in May, he joked, “I want to know if I can get Rachel’s e-mail address so that when my computer locks up, I can call you and you can fix it for me.” Ms. Sterne did not miss a beat.

“Absolutely,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on July 31, 2011, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Digital Matchmaker For the City and Its Public. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe